Saturday, July 13, 2013

Stealing stuff

I’d never try to argue that human innovation and achievement
has run out, but it does sometimes feel as if its capacity for meaningful
public discourse has hit the wall. Politics has never been so trivial;
substance has never been so crowded out by trivia and ephemera; it seems
unthinkable that we might ever conduct an even vaguely balanced mass
conversation about our long-term needs and how to get there. Rick Salutin
pointed out in The Star last week
that even bedrock terms like “democracy” have become degraded, essentially used
merely as a synonym for “elections,” regardless that those elections may be
rendered all but meaningless by the lies told at the time, or by subsequent
lack of faith. It’s a better way to go, argued Salutin counseled, if “you don’t
assume the definition of democracy or human progress has reached any fixed end
points. Most cultural activity only really began 8,000 to 12,000 years ago, as
a teenager recently told me; it would be odd to assume anything is complete. In
that light, it’s we who should uncouple from fixed definitions and learn
something from their openness.”

The Bling Ring

This might not seem like the most
obvious way into Sofia Coppola’s new film The
Bling Ring, based on the real life story from a few years ago about a group
of teenagers who got into burglarizing celebrity homes, taking off with several
million dollars in stuff. But I think the film’s main interest is in its
implicit challenge to governing concepts – morality, the “rule of law,”
property rights; it suggests their underpinning has become (at least in certain
quadrants of America) so distorted and degraded that it’s increasingly unclear
what they’re meant to safeguard. The kids in The Bling Ring might well be largely “uncoupled from fixed definitions” – the
trouble is, instead of this being a path to enlightenment, it strands them in
mind-boggling narcissism and idiocy.

The narrative gets under way as Marc, a
vaguely troubled kid of no great distinction, arrives at a new school, where he
instantly falls in with Rebecca, one of the hot girls. In a few minutes of
screen time, she’s leading him outside from a party to check out the parked
cars, finding a good percentage of them unlocked and containing spoils. They
progress into rifling empty houses, first the homes of no-names and then (aided
by Google as a supplier both of addresses and of information on who’s out of
town at any given moment) of the rich and famous, their favourite target being
Paris Hilton’s, which they hit up as you or I might visit a local Starbucks
(the premise, reasonable from what we see of the house, is that she has so much
stuff, she’d never miss any of it as long as they keep the nightly haul no
greater than, say, a small truckload). Of course, it’s a bubble that inevitably
bursts.

Taking from Paris

Their targets, like Hilton, all belong
to that category where the source of their fame and wealth is either unknown,
or else seems grossly disproportionate to their actual achievements, and Paris’
pad in particular resembles a department store cum nightclub cum Museum of
Paris Hilton more than a place where anyone might feel at home. Of course, there’s not much new to be said about such
excesses, and yet Coppola manages it, by conveying just how little any of these
trappings matter, how they constitute an existential black hole of meaning. As
the film presents it, the security at these buildings is shockingly lax, far
more so than it would be for a “normal” person, who actually cared about their
space and what it contained. The kids seem not to perceive their actions as
stealing, and how could they, when what they’re taking wasn’t “earned” by any
rational measure of functioning capitalism, doesn’t seem to fundamentally
matter to its notional owners, and has little inherent value relative to its
ticket price (it’s hard to imagine them wearing or using anything they steal
much more than once). When they’re caught, they barely seem to relate to the
development as other than a practical problem, which for at least one of them
might as much constitute a public relations opportunity (Lindsay Lohan’s jail
time gets cited several times). A shot near the end of Marc being led along in
an orange jumpsuit, followed and preceded by serious-looking convicts with the
kind of bodies and ambiance appearing nowhere else in the movie, emphasizes how
little any of this has to do with broader societal notions and impacts of
crime.

It’s not that Coppola defends her
subjects as such, but that she seems to regard them as beyond defense or
criticism, as embodiments of a complete moral absence. Writing in the British Observer, Catherine Shoard called the
film “a Tinseltown stitch-up that exonerates all
involved by understanding the plight of the crimes in terms of simple celeb
worship (and) actually acts as yet another ad. By reiterating the desirability
of starry clobber, Coppola is pushing positive brand reinforcement.” She adds:
“Coppola's dialogue is remorselessly authentic in its inanity, and this
blankness runs deep in what finally feels a shallow film about shallow people.”
Many other reviewers saw the film in broadly similar terms, and it’s not hard
to see where they’re coming from. But the depth of the blankness seems like the
point – any kind of imposed intelligence or analytical distance would be untrue
to the all-consuming absence of those qualities. If the film was going to be
made at all, it could only be as an artfully shallow one.

A better life?

You might
fairly argue though that the film didn’t
need to be made, that Coppola is mining to exhaustion a narrow seam of
material. Writing here about her last film Somewhere,
an examination of a star actor, I said it raised such questions as “if someone like Johnny Marco
isn’t living a better life than the average slacker, then what’s the point of it
all; in particular, what’s the nature of the attention directed at him, the
desire to be close to him?” and “we can find meaning in such lives if we look
for it, but why are we bothering?” These may not be exactly the same questions
as those raised by The Bling Ring,
but they don’t seem a million miles removed from them either. Still, Coppola is
skillful enough that it continues to seem like a useful line of investigation,
even if the inner layerings of Hollywood can only stretch so far in
illustrating broader issues.

I quoted Shoard as calling the film an “exoneration,” but it
would be a complex task to consider whether America retains enough intellectual
and ethical coherence to convict or exonerate anyone of much of anything; it’s
a country that seems fixed where it ought to be open, and vice versa. I don’t
think it’s quite at the point where Paris Hilton’s closet is a more meaningful
institution than, say, Congress, but it might be getting there fast.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).